Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#11201

Gunnar Birkerts

#11212

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Gunnar Birkerts was a Latvian American architect who, for most of his career, was based in the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan. Some of his notable designs include the Corning Museum of Glass and the Corning Fire Station in Corning, New York; Marquette Plaza in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela.

#11202

Duncan McCargo

#11213

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

#11203

Starr Roxanne Hiltz

#11214

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Starr Roxanne Hiltz is a retired Distinguished Professor of Information Science/Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology . She, along with Murray Turoff , are the authors of The Network Nation, a book that is described as "the seminal book that helped define the electronic frontier".

#11204

Naomi Alderman

#11215

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.

#11205

George Necula

#11216

Overall Influence

George Ciprian Necula is a Romanian computer scientist, engineer at Google, and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley who does research in the area of programming languages and software engineering, with a particular focus on software verification and formal methods. He is best known for his Ph.D. thesis work first describing proof-carrying code, a work that received the 2007 SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award.

#11206

Lars Gyllensten

Lars Gyllensten

#11217

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Lars Johan Wictor Gyllensten was a Swedish author and physician, and a member of the Swedish Academy. Gyllensten was born and grew up in a middle-class family in Stockholm, son of Carl Gyllensten and Ingrid Rangström, and nephew of Ture Rangström. He studied at the Karolinska Institute, becoming a doctor of medicine in 1953, and was an associate professor of histology there from 1955 to 1973.

#11207

Alex English

#11218

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Alexander English is an American former professional basketball player, coach, and businessman. A South Carolina native, English played college basketball at the University of South Carolina. He was drafted in the second round of the National Basketball Association draft in 1976. English played the small forward position and was a star player for the Denver Nuggets in the 1980s. During his Nuggets tenure , the team made the NBA playoffs nine consecutive times, won two Midwest Division titles, and reached the 1985 Western Conference Finals. English played 15 seasons in the NBA for four teams, averaging 21.5 points and 5.5 rebounds per game.

#11208

Peidong Yang

#11219

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Peidong Yang is a Chinese–American chemist, material scientist, and businessman. He is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Materials Science. His research group studies the synthesis of nanomaterials and their electronic and optical properties. He is also a Department Head at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Deputy Director of the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems .

#11209

Michael Geist

#11220

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Michael Allen Geist is a Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of four books on copyright law and privacy law, and he edits two newsletters on Canadian information technology and privacy law.

#11210

Moustafa Youssef

#11221

Overall Influence

Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.

#11211

Bruce Dawe

#11222

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Donald Bruce Dawe was an Australian poet and academic. Some critics consider him one of the most influential Australian poets of all time. Dawe received numerous poetry awards in Australia and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia. He taught literature in universities for over 30 years.

#11212

Michael Wilford

Michael Wilford

#11223

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Michael James Wilford CBE was an English architect from Hartfield, East Sussex. Wilford studied at the Northern Polytechnic School of Architecture, London, from 1955 to 1962, and at the Regent Street Polytechnic Planning School, London, in 1967. In 1960, he joined the practice of James Stirling and in 1971 together established the Stirling/Wilford partnership. He designed the British Embassy in Berlin.

#11213

Chris Claremont

Chris Claremont

#11224

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Christopher S. Claremont is an American comic book writer and novelist, known for his 16-year stint on Uncanny X-Men from 1975 to 1991, far longer than that of any other writer, during which he is credited with developing strong female characters as well as introducing complex literary themes into superhero narratives, turning the once underachieving comic into one of Marvel's most popular series.

#11214

Stephen L. Buchwald

#11225

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Stephen L. Buchwald is a U.S. chemist and Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT. He is known for his involvement in the development of the Buchwald-Hartwig amination and the discovery of the dialkylbiaryl phosphine ligand family for promoting this reaction and related transformations. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and 2008, respectively.

#11215

Stuart McCutcheon

#11226

Overall Influence

Stuart Norman McCutcheon was a New Zealand university administrator. Until March 2020 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, at which point he was the longest serving current Vice-Chancellor in New Zealand, having served three five-year terms. He was previously Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University of Wellington, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Assistant Vice-Chancellor at Massey University.

#11216

Usama Fayyad

#11227

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Usama M. Fayyad is an American-Jordanian data scientist and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is a speaker on Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, and Big Data. He recently left his role as the Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank.

#11217

Aaron Cicourel

#11228

Overall Influence

1928 - 2023 (95 years)

Aaron Victor Cicourel, was an American sociologist. A Professor of sociology who spent much of his career at the University of California, San Diego, he specialized in sociolinguistics, medical communication, decision-making, and child socialization. He was intellectually influenced greatly by Alfred Schutz, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel.

#11218

Geoffrey A. Landis

Geoffrey A. Landis

#11229

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Geoffrey Alan Landis is an American aerospace engineer and author, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He holds nine patents, primarily in the field of improvements to solar cells and photovoltaic devices and has given presentations and commentary on the possibilities for interstellar travel and construction of bases on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.

#11219

Vaclav Smil

#11230

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Vaclav Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies. He has also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

#11220

J. McVicker Hunt

#11231

Overall Influence

1906 - 1991 (85 years)

Joseph McVicker Hunt was a prominent American educational psychologist and author. He promoted and researched concepts related to the malleable nature of child intelligence . That work eventually led to the theory of learning centered on the concept of the information processing system.

#11221

José Scheinkman

#11232

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

José Alexandre Scheinkman is a Brazilian economist, currently the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of Economics at Columbia University and the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University. He spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, where he served as department chair immediately prior to his departure for Princeton. He is best known for his work in mathematical economics and finance, oligopoly theory and the social economics of cities and crime; he also helped spur the development of work at the intersection of economics, finance and physics. ...

#11222

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino

#11233

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino is a Peruvian linguist who has crucially contributed to the investigation and development of the Quechuan languages. He has also made outstanding contributions to the study of the Aymara, Mochica and Chipaya languages.

#11223

Peter Edelman

#11234

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Peter Benjamin Edelman is an American legal scholar. He is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in the fields of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law. He worked as an aide for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and in the Clinton Administration, where he resigned to protest Bill Clinton's signing the welfare reform legislation. Edelman was one of the founders and president of the board of the New Israel Fund.

#11224

Alfred Gell

#11235

Overall Influence

1945 - 1997 (52 years)

Alfred Antony Francis Gell, was a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. He was trained by Edmund Leach and Raymond Firth and did his fieldwork in Melanesia and tribal India. Gell taught at the London School of Economics, among other places. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy. He died of cancer in 1997, at the age of 51.

#11225

Steve Schneider

#11236

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Steve Schneider FBCS, CITP is an English computer scientist and Professor of Security. He is Director of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and Associate Dean at the University of Surrey. Biography Steve Schneider studied at Oxford University, joining the Oxford University Computing Laboratory to study for a Doctorate on CSP, which was awarded in 1989, supervised by Mike Reed. He joined Royal Holloway, University of London as a lecturer in 1994, becoming a senior lecturer in 1999 and a professor in 2002. He moved to the University of Surrey in 2004, and was head of the Department of Compu...

#11226

Michelle Obama

#11237

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is an American attorney and author who served as the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017, being married to former president Barack Obama. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. In her early legal career, she worked at the law firm Sidley Austin where she met her future husband. She subsequently worked in nonprofits and as the associate dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago. Later she served as, vice president for Community and External Affairs of the University of Chicago Medical Center.

#11227

Avner Friedman

#11238

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Avner Friedman is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at Ohio State University. His primary field of research is partial differential equations, with interests in stochastic processes, mathematical modeling, free boundary problems, and control theory.

#11228

Valentin Yanin

#11239

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Valentin Lavrentievich Yanin was a leading Russian historian who authored 700 books and articles. He had also edited a number of important journals and primary sources, including works on medieval Russian law, sphragistics and epigraphy, archaeology and history. His expertise was medieval Rus' especially Novgorod the Great, where he had headed archaeological digs beginning in 1962.

#11229

Tom Hayden

#11240

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

Thomas Emmet Hayden was an American social and political activist, author, and politician. Hayden was best known for his role as an anti-war, civil rights, and intellectual activist in the 1960s, authoring the Port Huron Statement and standing trial in the Chicago Seven case.

#11230

Brenda Schulman

#11241

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Brenda Schulman is an American biochemist and structural biologist who is a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Bavaria. Schulman's research interests focus on a class of proteins known as ubiquitin-like proteins.

#11231

Peter Mandaville

#11242

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Peter Mandaville is an American academic and former government official. Biography From 2015-16 he was senior advisor in the Secretary of State's Office of Religion & Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. His previous government work has included serving as a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where he was part of the team that helped to shape the U.S. response to the Arab Spring.

#11232

W. Chan Kim

#11243

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

W. Chan Kim is a South Korean business theorist. He is a Professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD, and co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France. He is known as co-author of the 2005 book Blue Ocean Strategy.

#11233

Luigi Colani

#11244

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Luigi Colani was a German industrial designer. His long career began in the 1950s when he designed cars for companies including Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Volkswagen, and BMW. In 1957, he dropped his first name Lutz using the name Luigi. In the 1960s, he began designing furniture, and as of the 1970s, he expanded in numerous areas, ranging from household items such as ballpoint pens and television sets to uniforms and trucks and entire kitchens. A striking grand piano created by Colani, the Pegasus, is manufactured and sold by the Schimmel piano company.

#11234

Aharon Dolgopolsky

Aharon Dolgopolsky

#11245

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Aharon Dolgopolsky, also spelled Aron was a Russian-Israeli linguist who is known as one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics. Biography Born in Moscow, he arrived at the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis in the 1960s, at around the same time but independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych. Together with Illich-Svitych, he was the first to undertake a multilateral comparison of the supposed daughter languages of Nostratic. Teaching Nostratics at Moscow University for 8 years, Dolgopolsky moved to Israel in 1976, and taught at the University of Haifa.

#11235

Boy George

#11246

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

George Alan O'Dowd , known professionally as Boy George, is an English singer, songwriter, actor, DJ and lead singer of the English pop band Culture Club. He began his solo career in 1987. Boy George grew up in Eltham and was part of the New Romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s to early 1980s. His look and style of fashion was greatly inspired by glam rock pioneers David Bowie and Marc Bolan. He formed the Culture Club with Roy Hay, Mikey Craig and Jon Moss in 1981. The band's second album Colour by Numbers sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Their hit singles include "D...

#11236

Richard Bartle

#11247

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created MUD1 in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds.

#11237

Daniel B. Klein

Daniel B. Klein

#11248

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Daniel Bruce Klein is an American professor of economics at George Mason University and an Associate Fellow of the Swedish Ratio Institute. Much of his research examines the works of Adam Smith, public policy questions, libertarian political philosophy, and the sociology of academia. He is the chief editor of Econ Journal Watch.

#11238

Daphne Patai

#11249

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Daphne Patai is an American scholar and author. She is professor emeritus of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction. She is the daughter of the anthropologist Raphael Patai.

#11239

Cyril Domb

#11250

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Cyril Domb FRS was a British-Israeli theoretical physicist, best known for his lecturing and writing on the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena of fluids. He was also known in the Orthodox Jewish world for his writings on science and Judaism.

#11240

Dirk Obbink

#11251

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Dirk D. Obbink is an American papyrologist and classicist. He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016. Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019, as a result of allegations that he had stolen some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and sold them to the Museum of the Bible.

#11241

Ieke Moerdijk

#11252

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Izak Moerdijk is a Dutch mathematician, currently working at Utrecht University, who in 2012 won the Spinoza prize. Education and career Moerdijk studied mathematics, philosophy and general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD cum laude in 1985 at the same institution. His thesis was entitled Topics in intuitionism and topos theory and was written under the supervision of Anne Sjerp Troelstra.

#11242

Anu Aga

#11253

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Anu Aga is an Indian billionaire businesswoman and social worker who led Thermax, an energy and environment engineering business, as its chairperson from 1996 to 2004. She was among the eight richest Indian women, and in 2007 was part of 40 richest Indians by net worth according to Forbes magazine. She was awarded with the Mumbai Women of the Decade Achievers Award by ALL Ladies League, the all ladies wing of ASSOCHAM.

#11243

Allan Snyder

#11254

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Allan Whitenack Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia where he also holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind. He is a co-founder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the International Australia Prize in 1997 and the Marconi Prize in 2001 for his contributions to optical physics. Snyder is also the Creator and Chairman of the What Makes a Champion? forum, an official Olympic cultural event first held at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. He is also the Chair of Research on the MindChamps World Research, Advisory and Education Team, wit...

#11244

Yoav Shoham

#11255

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Yoav Shoham is a computer scientist and a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His research spans artificial intelligence, logic and game theory. He has also founded and sold several AI companies.

#11245

Michael Gorman

#11256

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Michael Gorman is a British-born librarian, library scholar and editor/writer on library issues noted for his traditional views. During his tenure as president of the American Library Association , he was vocal in his opinions on a range of subjects, notably technology and education. He currently lives in the Chicago area with his wife, Anne Reuland, an academic administrator at Loyola University.

#11246

Raúl Zaffaroni

#11257

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni is a former Argentine polititian and judge. He served as a member of the Supreme Court of Argentina from 2003 until 2015, when he resigned due to age restrictions to hold the position. He subsequently served in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 2016 to 2022.

#11247

Liu Sifeng

#11258

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Liu Sifeng is a Chinese systems engineer. He is the director of the Institute for Grey Systems Studies at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China. He is best known for his work on grey system theory.

#11248

Divya Dwivedi

#11259

Overall Influence

Divya Dwivedi is an Indian philosopher and author. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work includes a focus on philosophy of literature, aesthetics, philosophy of psychoanalysis, narratology, critical philosophy of caste and race, and the political thought of Gandhi. She is the co-author of Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics.

#11249

Bernhard Neumann

Bernhard Neumann

#11260

Overall Influence

1909 - 2002 (93 years)

Bernhard Hermann Neumann was a German-born British-Australian mathematician, who was a leader in the study of group theory. Early life and education After gaining a D.Phil. from Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin in 1932 he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1935 and a Doctor of Science at the University of Manchester in 1954. His doctoral students included Gilbert Baumslag, László Kovács, Michael Newman, and James Wiegold. After war service with the British Army, he became a lecturer at University College, Hull, before moving in 1948 to the University of Manchester, where he spent the next 14 years.

#11250

Jean Shinoda Bolen

#11261

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Jean Shinoda Bolen is an American psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and author. She is of Japanese descent. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, she is an emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF Medical Center and member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over one hundred foreign editions. She was an NGO delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women .

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